m MIGEATION TO THE CITIES 39
the country. Housing conditions in those ghettos are almost
invariably bad, but acceptable to the new immigrant,
whose foremost wish is to find a cheap shelter. As soon,
however, as he has acquired the necessary means, he tries
to leave the ghetto for some better quarter.
In New York City there is a gradual shifting of the
Jewish inhabitants from the proletarian ghettos on the East
Side to Brooklyn and Bronx, and from there to fashionable
quarters, such as Washington Heights. This ' 'shifting3',
which immigrants, if specially lucky, accomplish in one
generation, but which usually takes two or three generations,
continually alters the distribution of the Jews in the New
York area. Now that, owing to the restrictions on immigra-
tion, new-comers no longer replace those who leave the
East Side, the number of Jews diminishes there, while it
increases in Bronx and Brooklyn.
Similar conditions prevail in other American cities—
Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland—which until recent years
had a strong Jewish immigration. Each has its proletarian
district, into which the immigrants crowd at first, but
which they gradually abandon for middle-class districts.
The social position of the American Jew is best defined by
the district he inhabits. This is the index of his economic
situation, and even of his political outlook, and most of all
of the stage he has reached in assimilation. The Jew in the
first ghetto is "orthodox" in his religion, in the second
"conservative", in the third "reformed" or "liberal".1 The
proletarian ghettos work as filtering-bed, in which immi-
grants, too old or unable to adjust themselves to new con-
ditions, sink to the bottom and form a residue. The others
—most of all the second generation—supply the outflow.
They do not, however, as a rule, move straight to the non-
Jewish districts, but pass through a second, middle-class,
ghetto. It takes some time before in the new country they
cease to feel strangers, and before they can freely move
1 Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago, 1928), p. 256.